I wear the pants!

Or at least sometime I think they let me...grudgingly.

So today I go off to work, which for the last few weeks has been one archive or another here in Fortaleza. My task has been to photograph hundreds of pages of yellowed agricultural and financial records dating back to the 70s. About as stimulating as a cup of decaff, but so it goes.

But if most days are stale decaf, today was Italian espresso, at least in terms of novelty.

So I arrive at the archives at 8 or so, rearing to take a few hundred photos of these statistics books....and I wasn't really thinking when I left, and so I went in shorts (read: not pants). I arrive at the place (which is a govt. complex) and walk in the entrance only to be instantly stopped by a woman wagging her finger at my hairy uncovered legs. I could see the thought "Heathen" percolating through her head as she told me that under no circumstances could I enter the archives in this attire.

As we're standing there arguing about this countless women walk by wearing incredibly short skirts. When I bring this discrepancy to her attention she looks slightly exasperated and says she just enforces the rules, she doesn't make them. Well....for every rule there is a way around it.

So an hour goes by and I'm sitting and scheming (this archive is pretty far out of town, and had data that we needed today for our research team...so I really needed to get in and get out and not sit arguing about "morality codes"-which I later found out this is called). And then walks up a women wearing short shorts! And in my head I'm like 'ha ha' join me on the couch sister...but THEN the gatekeeper of the holy grail gives the women a pair of pants out of a bag she has stashed under the desk!

And I'm like....whoooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Hold the train.

David: 'If this woman get's a pair of pants, then so do I'

Gatekeeper: 'No, these are women's pants. They're very small. There's no possible way you could fit in them.'

David: 'Do you think I'm too fat'

Gatekeeper: 'No, but they're very small'

David: ' I don't care, give them to me'

And I took the pants from her hand and squeezed into them (over my shorts) in the middle of the govt. lobby.

To say there was a look of surprise on her face and that of the amassed crowd would be a huge understatement.

To say I looked absolutely breathtaking in these pants would be an even larger understatement....as I could barely breathe in them!

So I went and took my photos...and then with such immature pleasure, relished in pulling them off and shoving them into the hand of the exasperated receptionist.